1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing/binding apparatus and a printing/binding method for executing a bookbinding process, for example.
2. Description of the Related Art
The market for print on demand (hereinafter, POD) is expanding in competition with the printing industry, with the advent of high-speed, high-quality electrophotographic printing apparatuses and inkjet printing apparatuses. POD offers an alternative to large-scale printers and printing techniques, eschewing large apparatuses and systems, and aiming to handle relatively small print run jobs compared to those of the printing industry in a short turnaround time. With printing/binding that uses POD, print data is generally stored in a storage area of an HDD in a POD apparatus called a hold queue. Subsequently, an operator performs one copy of printing/binding from the POD apparatus using print data in the hold queue, and checks the print content and the state of the binding. This is called a test print. If the test print is satisfactory, the operator performs the actual print to execute printing/binding for the remaining 100 copies, for example. Note that in this specification, the hold queue may also be called a BOX.
Conventionally, data remaining in the BOX and servers is deleted after the actual print is completed if data deletion is required immediately. If this is not the case, the data is often held for a while in case of a reprint. When printing highly confidential data, data in the BOX used in the test print and the actual print is manually deleted in the POD apparatus at the same time that the printed material is acquired.
Mechanisms for automatically deleting data have been proposed in contrast to this manual deletion of data. For example, there is an order data management system for storing the data and design templates of customers in order folders corresponding to the customer orders, and managing the order folders per order. With this system, an automated deletion process divided over multiple stages per order folder is performed. For example, customer data is deleted after one week, and design templates are deleted after two weeks (e.g., see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-182176).
A technique has also been proposed in which a client apparatus renders print data that is no longer required electronically nonreproducible, after transferring the print data to a printing apparatus such as an MFP (e.g., see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. H11-143658). Further, with this technique, confidentiality is retained by rendering data that is no longer required electronically nonreproducible after the completion of processing, even in the individual bookbinding devices such as print servers and printing apparatuses to which the print data was transferred.
There are also techniques that allow the operator to remain at the printing apparatus in the case where there are modifications that cannot be performed by the printing apparatus, by transmitting a modification request from the bookbinding device to an information processing apparatus such as a PC that manages the bookbinding device, and instructing that the job be rewritten (e.g., see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-34846).
However, since BOX data is deleted after printing is completed, it was necessary to again import the manuscript data, configure the binding settings, and store data to a BOX when an error or jam during binding or a problem during packaging/shipping was discovered after the BOX data had been deleted. Also, print settings and binding settings that had been fine-tuned at a device after a test print needed to be readjusted when reprinting was performed, since these settings were deleted together with the BOX data. Further, since job definition format (JDF) files constituting information defining print workflows contain content names and the like, there was a risk of customer information being inferred from the JDF files.